Satisfaction is practical. Delight is emotional. That is the big difference in the customer delight vs customer satisfaction divide. One achieves what was expected, the other delivers additional value.
Customer satisfaction is the process of achieving goals and consistently delivering the value you promised. Customer delight, on the other hand, is the “wow” factor. It proves to the customer that you intimately understand their needs and can proactively anticipate ways to improve their situation. Both are important aspects of customer success.
Customer Delight vs. Customer Satisfaction: How Do They Differ?
There is no need to pit customer delight against customer satisfaction. Each are goals you should pursue as you strive to provide value to your customers.
You should establish a clear pathway to product success early on in your customer relationship, complete with a series of goals that indicate progress. Customer satisfaction stems from following the path outlined and working towards those goals. For example, you might set a target for how quickly your customer should complete onboarding. Keeping an eye on customer progress and helping them meet this target makes the customer feel confident that you can follow through on your promises. Meeting the target milestones creates satisfaction.
Inspiring customer delight, in this case, means doing more than meeting the stated onboarding timeline. Maybe the onboarding timeline moves faster than expected or you identify additional ways for your main point of contact to show value to the team.
Being able to produce the unexpected requires you to understand your customer’s needs and business goals and anticipate how you can best help them. In addition, you should draw on your experiences with previous customers to refine standard processes. Solving a customer’s problem before they realize they have one is perhaps the most effective way of delivering a “wow” moment.
Best Practices for Customer Delight
The dominance of subscription business models has made it easier than ever for customers to be picky about who they work with. After all, they can simply walk away if a business partnership is not sufficiently meeting their needs. This is why it is important to create moments of customer delight whenever possible. Impressing rather than just servicing a customer makes them feel valued and increases loyalty.
There are several ways you can encourage customer delight, including:
Use Customer Segmentation
Segmentation is the process of organizing your customers into groups based on similar characteristics. It is a great way to scale your customer success efforts and accurately track accounts of the same business type, and size.
It can also be used as a learning tool. The experience of one customer can become the unexpected value of another. For example, recognizing low usage of a particular feature can help you determine when and how to increase your outreach and training. You can segment your outreach to reach the customer most in need of resource documentation to get started, an interactive webinar, or best practice refreshers.
Collect Voice of Customer Data
The process of gathering, analyzing, and acting on customer feedback can provide vital insight into the customer experience. Customers are more likely to remain loyal when they feel their voice has been heard.
Promptly responding to customer feedback and working to make changes based on their opinions is a powerful way of impressing your customers and moving beyond simple satisfaction.
Share Customer Information
Your customer should never have to repeat themselves when talking to members of your team. By gathering timely customer data and sharing it across your enterprise, you surround the customer with personalized service. Every time your customer engages with anyone, they should be impressed with how intimately your team understand their needs.
Provide Personal, Proactive Messaging
By closely tracking customer behavior, you can personalize your messaging around the customer’s current status. Such engagements build on the practicalities of following your product plan and prepare the customer for the next phase of their journey. Maintaining that personal touch can be a great way to produce customer delight.
Use the Right Software
Attempting to manage all your customers manually is time-consuming and ineffective. To provide the best support possible, give your team customer success software. Your customer success software should allow you to closely monitor the health of your customers without demanding intense high-touch resources. It will make it easy to keep an eye on key metrics, analyze customer data, and identify the best course of action. Using an advanced platform, you can establish an early-warning system that informs you of any changes in customer behavior as they occur. Such alerts let you act quickly to proactively provide value based on a customer’s shifting situation.
Going the Extra Mile for Customers
Customer satisfaction is enough to protect many customers from churn. Establishing and achieving business-related goals fosters growth so you can continue to deliver value to your customers.
If you want to move beyond that and affect your customers on an emotional level, however, you have to produce the unexpected. Providing extra insight, anticipating future need, and engaging in a personal manner creates customer delight that inspires loyalty and promotes long-term customer relationships.
Totango’s customer success platform gives you the power to impress your customers. If you explore Spark, you will find a customizable solution that can turn customer data into meaningful business knowledge. Request a demo today, and take your customers from satisfied to delighted.
